The stories that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’
Stephen King might be one of the only people who believes 1997’s three-episode miniseries is the definitive adaptation of The Shining, with the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece widely acknowledged as not just one of the greatest horror movies ever made but one of the best films of all time.
Even though its director was already one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the industry – one that was held in the highest esteem by his peers and contemporaries – Kubrick still drew his own influences and inspirations from not just the people who’d inspired him but a relatively new name on the cinematic block.
David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead arrived in 1977, a little over a year before cameras started rolling on The Shining in May 1978. Heralding the arrival of a brand new and singular talent on the scene, Kubrick was instantly enamoured by the surrealist body horror, even naming it as one of his personal favourites.
When trying to convey the atmosphere he wanted to create to his cast and crew, Kubrick would inform Lynch that he showed them Eraserhead “to put them in the mood”, and the themes of isolation, fatherhood, and fractured families are prevalent in both. More obviously, the iconic scene in the Overlook Hotel’s room 237 mirrors a sequence in Lynch’s film with protagonist Henry Spencer and his neighbour.
In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick acknowledged how one of his earlier credits played into his seminal chiller, albeit in a roundabout way. In the early 1950s, he’d worked as a second unit director on TV series Omnibus, but it wasn’t an episode he contributed to that ended up influencing The Shining.
Instead, it was the show’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel’ that left a mark, with Kubrick explaining how the short story – which fittingly involves the misfortunes to befall its protagonist at a hotel – impacted his work: “You think the point of the story is that his death was inevitable because a paranoid poker player would ultimately get involved in a fatal gunfight,” he said. “But, in the end, you find out that the man he accused was actually cheating him.”
Furthering the comparison, Kubrick noted, “The Shining uses a similar kind of psychological misdirection to forestall the realization that the supernatural events are actually happening.” Deepening those literary influences further, the director was also known to cite Franz Kafka as another who left their fingerprints all over his haunting tale of terror.
Comparing “the mood of the film to the lucid style of Kafka’s writing,” the horrors of The Shining were aptly described by Kubrick as Kafkaesque “since they take place not in the gloomy shadows of an old private home, but in the bright public rooms of modern life and activity.”
A black-and-white cult classic, an episode of an educational variety series that went off the air in 1961, and the writings of Kafka make for an unusual trio, but each strand of their respective DNA is undoubtedly clear upon watching The Shining.
